Mike McCardell

“Pretend it is your very last meal on earth. You can have anything you want and you can have any famous chef cook it.”

Tempting offer. I was in a radio studio. The subject, what do you really want to eat when you know you are not going to eat again?

Tough question.

No. Not at all. I knew the answer. All the people before me had picked famous men in tall white white hats who had written books and were on television saying how they add four grains of salt from the Adriatic and not three from the North Sea.

They were fancy cookers of fancy meals with names I cannot say.

“I want a barbeque from my buddy Dave McKay,” I said.

“Who’s Dave?” asked the interviewer.

“Dave is the coolest cook, barbequer, chef I have ever known. He is a pork and beef and chicken genius. He is Rembrandt with sauce. He is Shakespeare with charcoal.”

You are getting the picture, I like this guy.

He is a cameraman at Global TV and he is good at taking pictures. But mostly I like working with him because sometimes he will open a package of pulled pork and say, “Try this. I have new sauce.”

“Oh, my god. My mouth is dripping, which is not a good thing when I still have to go out and work.”

I have tasted many of his barbeques. I am lucky. And I am unlucky. I can’t eat anything else now. His makes my tongue vibrate down to my toes.

I go out to a restaurant and my tongue says, “Are you kidding? Get me the real thing.”

I was so proud when I read a story about him in the National BBQ News out of Atlanta, Georgia. I mean, this guy lives in B.C. and no one in Georgia knows where B.C. is.

But they know Dave. And so do I. For my last meal, I want Dave standing over the charcoal. And I hope he will be trying a new sauce.